Friday Happy Hour: The Lavender Ghost

Today’s cocktail recipe is a fancy version of a gin sour, but with the botanical addition of lavender. Lavender can be a great addition to a cocktail; it’s flowery but also has an earthy flavor that can nicely complement gin or other spirits. This cocktail is something of a specialty drink, one that demands a pretty specific ingredient, but if you can track some down (or make your own), it’s worth it: the Lavender Ghost.

Combine the ingredients, shake with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass and enjoy!

Nole surprised me one day with a wonderful gift of some Royal Rose syrups, including their lavender-lemon syrup. I gave their suggested cocktail recipes a try and found this one, the Lavender Ghost, was a real stand-out.

Royal Rose Lavender-Lemon syrup is sweet, flowery, and citrusy, but also has a botanical complexity to it that makes this more than just a sweetener and makes it pair well with dry gin. The resulting drink is sweet, tart, flowery, botanical, and delicious.

The Lavender Ghost is basically a fancied-up gin sour. Sours belong to one of the oldest, simplest, biggest, and best families of cocktail. Each sour at its heart combines a spirit with a citrus and a sweetener. Tweak any one of those ingredients and you basically get a new drink, whether it’s the Sidecar, or the Margarita, or the Daiquiri. The gin sour is properly known as the White Lady, which is also a mythical name for a type of female ghost, making the Lavender Ghost a very clever name from the people at Royal Rose.